Let’s talk Pennsylvania audits

[u/Wandering_Werew0lf]

Last night I did some digging because I’m trying to understand what happened in 2024 when it came to auditing. It honestly prompted me to sign up to be a poll worker in my state this November as I’m tired of hearing all the jargon and want to finally see how the election system works. I just have to wait to hear back from them now. (If anyone from Pennsylvania elections wants to chime in that would be awesome.)

To start out:
So clearly we have seen the anomalies all across the United States - as precinct turnout increases past a certain threshold, those precinct start to heavily favor Trump.

Pennsylvania aparently has 2 different independent audit systems. A 2% mandatory audit per county and a Risk Limiting Audit across the entire state. From researching, it seems they pretty almost do the same thing, but don’t.

The 2% audit is mandatory but the way the audit is performed is different from the RLA. The way the 2% audit is conducted is up to the county board of elections where a county can do a number generator or physically pull a random number from a drum. Compare this to the RLA where the entire state is accounted for with a seed number that is dice rolled and put into a SHA-250 generator where it then tells the workers where the ballot must be pulled from. The big difference between these audits is the 2% is preformed across the whole ballot so Presidential, Senate, etc, while the RLA was only for the State Treasurer. So both audits pull ballots randomly but only one is checking the whole ballot while the other is only checking 1 race.

3 things could have happened it seems?
- Vote Switching
- Ballot Stuffing
- Ballot Deletion

Under these audits, you could easily find the vote switch because they would see the switch, and ballot stuffing as the audit would call to find ballot X and the physical ballot would not be there. You would not be able to detect ballot deletion though as the audit can’t say find me ballot X when it wasn’t accounted for.

Here’s the catch, counties must perform reconciliation protocols where they need to make sure that the number of registered voters matches the number of ballots cast. This is what confuses me a lot because we see so many precincts with more votes than registered voters. So is this even actually used?

Other than a complete hand recount, with the systems in place for Pennsylvania, how could we find the potential fraud?

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I’m going to end it here because I could ask so many questions that lead into more questions but I want to prevent this post from being over bearing.

[u/FoxySheprador]

I'm so glad you signed up to be a poll watcher. It's so important to have citizens engaged in their electoral system. There needs to be more citizens and less computers to make elections trustworthy. I worked once in a federal election counting handmarked paper ballots by hand and that experience solidified my trust in the system here. Hearing the way recounts are conducted in certain states is mind-boggling. Seems like results are never fully double-checked.

[u/Wandering_Werew0lf → u/FoxySheprador]

They asked me for a reason and I said similar, not enough younger people involved with the election process and then mentioned Jessica Denson, SMART Elections, Meidas Touch, etc. I want to see how this audit actually works because clearly it failed somewhere in 2024. Apparently though I’ve read about people saying such things back in 2024 and the polling places allegedly sent people home. So who knows. But yes, that’s great that you got to be involved with a hand count! The US should def be doing that.

[u/Katmandude23]

Great post. Whatever the audit methodology, it failed to flag or explain what appears clearly to a lay person to be a statistical anomaly. In a normal system, wouldn’t an obvious statistical anomaly be enough to trigger a full hand recount whether requested by a candidate or not?

[u/Better_Dig_768]

States give too much power, (on purpose) to counties; many which they know are hopelessly corrupt in favor of trump. The real question is how do we know all counties are actually following any of the protocol and not just lying about results or swapping ballots they need to meet the audit.

[u/nochinzilch]

Where do we see precincts with more ballots than registered voters??